May 17, 2017

As a lead up to GAI AgTech Week 2017, the GAI team thought it would be interesting to tell you about some of the local agtech players we’ve been meeting we’ve been meeting during our planning of this third annual agtech event, which will take place in Boston in June.

TellusLabs
David Potere, PhD
CEO | Co-Founder 

TellusLabs combines decades of satellite imagery with a machine learning platform to answer critical, time-sensitive economic and environmental questions.

1. How did you come into the agtech scene and what was your personal inspiration?

While serving as a Navy officer in the late 1990s, I fell in love with satellite imagery. That took me into graduate work, where I met my co-founder, Prof. Mark Friedl. Mark and I share a conviction that today, spaceborne insights are at an inflection point. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in sensors, computing power, and machine learning, imagery from space is emerging as an objective source of early, accurate, granular intelligence in many sectors.  Agriculture is the most important of these. I am inspired by what is possible as these next-generation models and metrics migrate from the lab bench to the field.

2. Please tell us a bit about TellusLabs. How will your technology disrupt the agriculture sector?

Agriculture market participants have consulted weather data for a long time, but they’ve done relatively little with the quadrillions of data points of satellite imagery. It’s not because of oversight – growers, traders, and producers are among the savviest operators in the economy – it’s because the technology hasn’t existed to convert that massive potential into insight. By providing software and analytics powered by remote sensing and weather data combined, we hope TellusLabs technology can super-charge this sector, not disrupt it.

3. How has being located in the Boston area supported your business goals?

MassChallenge was a game-changer for us! The staff, the mentors, and the colleagues were a big factor in helping us take TellusLabs from a collection of prototype algorithms and exciting ideas to a thriving business. The talent here in Boston, from a technology and business standpoint, really is world class. Boston is becoming a hub for a couple of the tech scenes we care about: not just agtech but also “space tech”, with a couple other seed-stage businesses (like Accion or Analytical Space) as well as market leaders (like Draper).

4. Are you currently raising capital, and how do you see your company evolving over the next five years?

We raised $3.1 million in seed funding this January from a set of fantastic VC funds, led by IA Ventures. That funding has given us the opportunity to build our team and our technology the way we want to. In the next couple years, we will to broaden the geographic and thematic scope of our agriculture offering to better cover the global supply chain.  That means partnering to provide more targeted insights that serve participants such as growers, elevators, and other regional-to-local participants. Over the coming years, we aim to demonstrate the broad applicability of our technology stack and our approach, tackling solutions in sectors such as energy, forestry, water, and defense/intelligence.